Poizner rehearses campaign speech for San Jose Chamber

afternoon, testing out his campaign speech for next year’s governor’s race.

That’s not the way it was billed, of course. The talk to the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce was advertised as a speech by a top elected official on California’s financial future. Poizner even took a couple of minutes to talk about his Department of Insurance and its importance to the state.

But Poizner, a former Silicon Valley tech type, already has started to collect money for the June 2010 primary to replace the termed-out Arnold Schwarzenegger and when he talked about “When I’m governor …” it didn’t sound like the slip he suggested it was.

In his talk, the Los Gatos resident gave plenty of hints that he won’t be running a typical GOP campaign next year. Sure, he talked about the need to improve the state’s business climate and reform the tax and regulatory atmosphere, but he also pointed at the need to raise teacher salaries, reform and upgrade the school system and end the partisan gridlock that he said has stymied progress for most of the past 30 years.

“The people in Sacramento, pretty much from both parties, are

oblivious” to the changes taking place in the state, national and

international economy, Poizner told the crowd at San Jose’s Fairmont

Hotel. “Republicans and Democrats better get together and make some

new policies or the state will continue to deteriorate.”

When any statewide official comes out calling for wholesale changes in the governmental system that got him where he is (See: “Blowing Up the Boxes,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger), skepticism is a good thing.

Talking about change is a lot easier than actually making that change happen, as the governor has discovered.

commissioner has worked overtime to collect endorsements from many of the state’s best-known Republicans, come election time, you can expect Poizner to spend a lot more time talking about his year as a volunteer high school teacher and his background as an engineer and entrepreneur than about his 2004 run for Assembly, his work with the California GOP or his four years running a huge state office.